Leaderboard Zone

Next up on the Web 2 Summit interview docket is John Donahoe, President and CEO of eBay. This marks a return of sorts for eBay to the Summit stage, it’s been four years since former CEO Meg Whitman joined us. Much has changed – eBay faces significant competition in its PayPal business, and unwound its Skype acquisition, for example. It also purchased GSI Commerce, a company that might best be called a “white label Amazon.” But eBay is also a company on a mission, with its new X.commerce payment platform, a renewed focus on mobile commerce, and the addition of a Facebook executive to its Board of Directors.

Given this is Donahoe’s first Web 2 Summit interview, I’d love your input. What do you want to hear from him, and about his company?

As an extra incentive, I’ll be picking the best three questions from these series of posts (including Pincus, Marc Benioff, Paul Otellini, Dick Costolo, Michael Dell, Dennis Crowley, Mary Meeker, Michael Roth, Steve Ballmer, James Gleick, Vic Gundotra, and Reid Hoffman, among others.) The authors of those questions will get complimentary passes to Web 2 – a more than $4000 value. So get to commenting, and thank you!

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Today kicks off my annual postings on folks I’ll be in interviewing for the Web 2 Summit. Every year I seek your input, every year you help me get smarter, and I thank you for that.

The Web 2 Summit (to which all readers of this site are invited) kicks off Oct. 17th with Mark Pincus, a fellow I’ve known for over a decade, since his days at Freeloader, Support.com, and Tribe. But Zynga has become his signature success, becoming one of the fastest growing companies of the past decade, and shorthand for “games” across the social web. Zynga filed for a much-anticipated IPO earlier this year, though as with nearly every company in the space, the market seems to have cooled since then. In late August, reports circulated that Zynga was delaying its IPO, but those were never confirmed.

I doubt Mark will answer any questions related to the IPO, given he is still in a quiet period, but there’s plenty more to talk about. Pincus got the Vanity Fair treatment in June, and he’s certainly a classic Valley character.

But I’m more interested in Pincus’ take on the Internet’s strategic landscape – he’s been through bruising negotiations with Facebook over credits, he’s recently taken his games to Google+ and other platforms, and he has his finger on the pulse of some sixty or so million daily game players. If anyone can grok Web 2’s theme of “The Data Frame,” it’s Pincus.

I can and will ask Mark about scaling a startup, managing growth, his personal story, etc. But Searchblog readers certainly know Zynga, and you have questions for Mark and for his company. What might they be?

As an extra incentive, I’ll be picking the best three questions from these series of posts (they will include Pincus, Marc Benioff, Paul Otellini, Dick Costolo, Michael Dell, Dennis Crowley, Mary Meeker, Michael Roth, Steve Ballmer, James Gleick, Vic Gundotra, and Reid Hoffman, among others. The authors of those questions will get complimentary passes to Web 2 – a more than $4000 value. So get to commenting, and thank you!

Earlier this year I posted about an idea we’ve come up with to create a new “data layer” on top of last year’s popular “Points of Control” map. We created this map to visualize the theme of the Web 2 Summit conference, which is coming up again in a few weeks.

As you can see from the map, we’ve visualized eight key Internet players as cities, with each of the buildings representing storehouses of key data types. Cities are scaled by the size and engagement of their audiences, with data driven by our partner Nielsen and also company-reported sources. A detailed legend is here.

The map is still a work in progress, and there’s plenty of opportunity for you to comment on it. And there’s more coming – soon anyone will be able to create their own city, based on their own company, or one they think should join the map. Check it out, and stay tuned for more news.

From time to time I have the honor of contributing to a content series underwritten by one of FM’s marketing partners. It’s been a while since I’ve done it, but I was pleased to be asked by HP to contribute to their Input Output site. I wrote on the impact of location – you know I’ve been on about this topic for nearly two years now. Here’s my piece. From it:

Given the public face of location services as seemingly lightweight consumer applications, it’s easy to dismiss their usefulness to business, in particular large enterprises. Don’t make that mistake. …

Location isn’t just about offering a deal when a customer is near a retail outlet. It’s about understanding the tapestry of data that customers create over time, as they move through space, ask questions of their environment, and engage in any number of ways with your stores, your channel, and your competitors. Thanks to those smartphones in their pockets, your customers are telling you what they want – explicitly and implicitly – and what they expect from you as a brand. Fail to listen (and respond) at your own peril.

August is a month of vacation, of beaches, reading, and leisure….unless you happen to work with me creating the program for the eighth annual Web 2 Summit this October. Each year, my “summer vacation” turns into a “working vacation” as my team and I spend hours massaging more than 50 speakers into a tightly choreographed program running over what always turns out to be an extraordinary three days. I must be a masochist. Because I always love how it turns out.

This year, as I wrote earlier, our theme is “The Data Frame.” And this year’s program hews more tightly to our theme than any before it. Just about every speaker will be presenting on some aspect of how data changes the game in our industry. From policy to tech, art to retail, we’ve got one of the most varied lineups ever. You can see it here, but remember, these are extremely volatile times. In other words, the lineup might change a bit in the next six weeks. I’m just glad I didn’t ask Carol Bartz to come back, but then again, that would have been fun, no?

Web 2 is a year book of sorts, a stake in the ground where our industry has some of its most important conversations. This year we are taking a new tack – eliminating panels altogether, and focusing on our trademark conversations, as well as short, high impact presentations.

Here are a few I’m really looking forward to.

We’ll start day one with Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga. Mark has been busy, in particular given both the growth of Zynga and the recent turmoil in the financial markets, which plan on welcoming his company to public status at some point in the near future. But Mark is just the starting gun of an amazing opening session, one that will include John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, Dennis Crowley, co-founder of foursquare, Ross Levinsohn,

EVP Americas at Yahoo!, and Reid Hoffman, founder and Chair of LinkedIn, the public market’s current darling.

Of the group, I’m particularly pleased to welcome Ron Wyden, Senator from Oregon. This will mark Web 2’s first ever visit from a sitting senator, and our industry will have plenty to discuss with him – he’s the man who has taken stands on COICA and its cousin Protect IP, controversial (and many would say flawed) pieces of legislation that may have significant impacts on how the Internet works.

After cocktails we’ll sit down to dinner, and I’m very pleased to announce that our dinner conversation with be with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, a man who would win any “funniest CEO” competition. running away. Be prepared to snort wine through your nose.

Day two opens with Dell CEO Michael Dell, who will have plenty to say about the moves of his competitors HP, Apple, and Samsung. We’ll get our first taste of a new program element – “Pivot” – short presentations tailored to shift your thinking in five minutes or less. You’ll hear Pivots from Tony Conrad (about.me),Chris Poole (Canv.as, 4chan), Bill Gross (uber media), Aileen Lee (KPCB), David Hornik (August Capital) and many more.

We’ll also hear from two data and privacy policy experts – Dr. Ann Cavoukian, of the Ontario Office of Information & Privacy, and David Vladeck, of the FTC. Ben Horowitz (of Andreessen Horowitz) will sit for a conversation, as will John Partridge, President of Visa, and Dan Schulman, Group President, American Express – together. That’s sort of like getting Coke and Pepsi in the same room, which, it turns out, we did. Over the three days, we’ll hear from both Alison Lewis, CMO of Coca Cola Inc., as well as Frank Cooper, CMO of Pepsico Beverages.

This brings me to another important point – with data, all companies must become Internet companies. John, Dan, Alison, and Frank will bring that point home. As will Michael Roth, CEO of IPG, one of the largest advertising holding companies on the planet.

And of course we’ll hear from Mary Meeker, in her eighth appearance at Web 2. But this time, I’ve given her enough time to both do her “capital markets roundup,” as well as sit down with us and discuss her new role as partner at Kleiner Perkins.

A highlight of Day Two will be Thomas Drake, who used to work at the NSA on a forward-looking data surveillance program called ThinThread. While there, he uncovered facts about how the NSA was conducting surveillance which he believed was illegal. He blew the whistle, was charged with espionage, and lived to tell the tale.

Rounding out Day Two will be Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of American, Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, and Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

But wait…there’s more! Sprinkled throughout the three days will be our trademark “High Order Bits” – shortform presentations designed to amaze, inspire, and even perplex. We’ll hear from voices as varied as GenevieveBell, in house anthropologist at Intel, Peter Vesterbacka, the “Mighty Eagle” of Rovio,

That’s a lot of names, and we’re not close to being done. Highlights of day three include James Gleick, who has written one of the most important books about data in recent years (“The Information”), and a passel of Facebook alums: Sean Parker, who has yet another startup to discuss, Dave Morin, of Path, and Charlie Cheever together with his co-founder Adam D’Angelo, of Quora. More High Order Bits will come from Hilary Mason, of bit.ly, Jeremie Miller, of Singly, and Josh James, of Domo.

Rounding out the day are Andrew Mason, of Groupon fame, and Vic Gundotra, the man behind Google+.

Whew. And that’s not even all the great folks who are coming. It’s going to be a spectacular three days. I hope you’ll join us!

My deepest thanks go out to my Web 2 Advisory Board, which gave me a lot of great input on the program, and to the teams at O’Reilly, Techweb, and FM. As well as all our amazing sponsors, of course, and my producer extraordinare, Janetti Chon. It’s almost showtime!

PS – Look for our announcement next week about the new “Data Layer” on our “Points of Control” map. It’s going to rock!

I know I’ve been a bit quiet here on Searchblog of late, and I’ve promised that will change shortly, as I ramp up on the new book. But one faction of Searchblog has not been quiet: the comment spammers. So I am turning comments off for a while, in the hopes it will make the spammers go elsewhere for a bit. I’ll be redesigning the site over the summer, moving it from this antiquated (and pretty much abandoned) Moveable Type codebase to WordPress, and doing a number of other key upgrades. I’ll turn comments on again soon, but for a while, things will be quiet here. Sorry about that, but that’s the Internet, it takes advantage of weaknesses. And right now, Moveable Type’s spam blocking is terrible.

I’m looking for someone with whom to work on my next book project, What We Hath Wrought. The person I’m looking for is probably impossible to find, but I’m going to try anyway. Why impossible? Because I haven’t met someone like the person I’m imagining, at least not in the right context.

Back when I needed a partner to help me get FM off the ground, I wrote a post looking for an office manager/person friday. I spoke of how I needed someone just like Stacey, who now runs conferences for FM. Out of the blue nowhere I found Jennifer, who is now our Chief of Staff. I never thought I’d find someone like her, but the web found a way. It’s my hope lightening might strike twice.

The person I’m looking for loves the practice of writing. He or she loves complicated but fascinating topics, loves to figure out how to understand them, and loves explaining those topics with words. This is a core skill, and whoever I work with has to have it. Not because I intend to co-write the book with this person (I don’t), but because having this skill means you’ve cleared a hurdle to working with me on this project. In other words, non writers need not apply.

Sure, there’ll be writing, but it’ll be more along the lines of writing up findings from reading papers, or articles, more like epistolary communication with me. And debates, and arguments. I like those, if the counterpart is worthy. A sharp and questioning mind is required. But if you’re a cocksure asshole, well, find another one to work with. God knows there are a lot of them in the writing world.

I could imagine, should this person prove astute, that some of his or her writing will end up here on Searchblog, under their byline of course.

But I also need this person to be someone who Just Gets Shit Done and Doesn’t Complain About It. As in “can you figure out the best transcription software for me to use?” Even if you can’t name a brand of samesaid software (I can name just one), you’ll Figure It Out and Get It Done.

Oh, and you won’t Make Stupid Assumptions, instead, you’ll Ask Intelligent Questions and go from there. Such as “OK, Battelle, in what context will you be using this software? On what machine? To what end? Do you need it to work in real time? What’s your budget?” Etc.

If this sounds easy to you, well, read on. If you hate this job description, I’m not sure we’re going to get along.

I’m going to send this person on odd errands at times. Like “go find out everyone who matters who’s ever cited Edmund Burke as it relates to the book.” Or “I think I need a bookshelf. Do you think I need a bookshelf? Yeah, let’s get a bookshelf.” Oh, and “can you please figure out how to get my notes from my Kindle into some kind of organized fashion?”

Oh, which brings me to another part of the work. I’m reading a lot of books, articles, and posts. And I’m talking to a lot of folks. And I’m taking a lot of notes. And to most mortals, I am sure these notes mean next to nothing. But to this person, they are a treasured asset that they will curate and help make sense of, over time, helping me to build some kind of sensible approach to this massive and terrifying project.

For example, step one would just be helping me figure out the right bookmarking app to use. And step two would be figuring out a cool custom search engine to apply against it. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Are you out there? I pay well, and a lot of folks will attest, I’m pretty fun to work with, at least if you have the right attitude.

Work will be from my offices in Marin and San Francisco, as well as your home. So if you are not in the Bay Area, that could be an issue.

This will be full time for at least a few months (to start), but it’s probably at least half time after that (and we can probably keep it full time in some way. I have a lot going on). I’m looking for someone who’s got some experience, so if you’re still in college, or just out, I’m pretty sure this isn’t for you.

If you’re the right person, contact me. You’re smart enough to figure out how, and what to say when you do. (And tell me whose picture that is up at the top). Folks who know me well, who are reading this, please help a brother out, will ya? Thanks.

Sometime today the following blurb was sent to the book publishing trade press:

Author ofThe Search, co-founder of Wired, founder of Federated Media, Inc., and Executive Producer of the Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle’s WHAT WE HATH WROUGHT will give us a forecast of the interconnected world in 2040, then work backwards to explain how the personal, economic, political, and technological strands of this human narrative have evolved from the pivotal moment in which we find ourselves now. Based on thorough analysis and hundreds of interviews with political, technological, and cultural leaders, as well as a deep understanding of this story’s colorful history, Battelle will work with Dominick Anfuso and Hilary Redmon at Free Press (World) and Esther Newberg at ICM to bring this visionary tale to life. The book is scheduled to arrive in early 2013.

Apparently the announcement was picked up as the first item in a publication called Publishers’ Marketplace, but I can’t link to it, because it’s subscription only. Ah, the publishing world. I can’t believe I’m jumping back in. But more on that in a future post.

The new book announcement blurb is a staple of that world, it’s funny how short and dense they are, given they are attempting to describe what will probably be a 400 or so page tome once all is said and done. I suppose it makes sense in a way – as the author, I’m not really sure what path this book will take, and to be honest with you I’m more than a bit terrified by the scale and scope of this project.

Which is why I decided to do it.

So a bit more on what it is, and why I’m doing it now.

Those of you who visit regularly will be familiar with my annual predictions, which are a popular feature of the site. For the past four or so years, I’ve predicted that I’ll finally get around to starting work on my next book. (For those of you who are new to Searchblog, the site started as a way to bounce ideas around in public as I wrote my first book, The Search, way back in 2003. That book came out in 2005.)

In my 2010 predictions, for example, I wrote this: “I’ll figure out what I want to do with my book. SOGOTP, so to speak. Three years of predicting that I’ll start it is getting a bit old, eh? I feel good about branching back out into more contemplative fields, with FM in a strong position and our economy coming out from its defensive crouch.” Well, by the end of the year, I had figured out, broadly, what I wanted to do, but I had not given it a name, nor had I written a proposal or gotten my work life in a space that would allow me to actually execute the reporting and writing necessary to do justice to the topic I had chosen. A year later, in 2011, I didn’t even bother writing about the book in my predictions, because I knew I’d be working on it by mid year.

And here we are. It’s been a long process, getting ready to work on this book. FM was born at the same time as my last book, and for a while, I was both a startup CEO, new author (with 26 international editions and a lot of publicity support to do), as well as the Executive Producer of a new conference, the Web 2.0 Summit. For the next four years, my main focus was Federated, with a side of Web 2. But the new book was calling me the entire time. I knew I had to get back to writing, because when I did, I knew I’d be more engaged, much smarter about the world I love, and frankly, a more valuable asset to the company I founded. Back in September of 2009, I hired Deanna Brown as President and COO of Federated Media. Early this year, I promoted her to CEO, and took the title of Executive Chair. Deanna has been doing an extraordinary job, and I feel, after 18 months of preparation, that I can finally take the time to tackle this next big project. My commitment to FM remains, but now I have the time to dig into this new project.

So what is it? Well, settle in. This is my first attempt at describing the book in public, and I’m not sure where it’ll go. I’ll start with the title, which is a play on the first words sent over American telegraph wires by Samuel Morse in May of 1844. On the occasion of opening an experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, DC, Morse decided to send a Biblical quote comprised of these words: “What Hath God Wrought.” There’s a longer story as to why those words were chosen, but I find them compelling for a number of reasons. Morse, an artist by trade, was attempting to describe, in as few words as possible, the magnitude and potential of the moment. Here was man transmitting his thoughts, his intentions, his very words across time and space. (Were such an invention extant when Morse’s wife had died, he’d have had time to be by her side, for example). Such a concept was so foreign to that era that its impact could really only be ascribed to God.

Fast forward 167 years or so, and we can see what hath been wrought – but by man, not God. Morse’s first public telegram – a prehistoric tweet, if you will – begat a wave of communications and computational innovation that is only quickening. And as an observer and occasional journalist covering this field, I’m struck by the current moment – a time where the average consumer and citizen creates terabytes of data, and the average company or government is rapidly reorganizing itself to capitalize on that fact. In short, we’ve built a platform capable of totally rewiring how our society works. What, I wonder, will we make of it?

That is the driving question of the book. As I wrote in my proposal:

The world is captivated by stories of the Internet’s expanding power. Revolution sweeps across Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond – powered by Facebook and Twitter. A café owner in Oregon tries out a new promotional service called Groupon and finds herself overwhelmed with hundreds of new customers – and nearly out of business. Terrorism in Moscow, murder in Tehran, and madness in Hollywood are broadcast for all to view on YouTube – as we watch, we are transformed.

But how will that transformation look a generation from now?

In less than five years, more than 600 million of us have committed our identities to Facebook, a service whose story is already an Academy Award-winning film. Every move by Apple has become a cultural event, and the company is credited with revolutionizing not just the music industry, but the communications and computing industries as well. And the fastest growing company in history, Google, recently ceded that title to yet another Internet phenomenon – the social commerce site Groupon.

In the decade since search redefined how we consume information, we have learned to make the world a game and the game our world, to ask and answer “what’s happening,” “what’s on your mind,” and “where are you?” Each purchase, search, status update, and check-in layers our world with data. Billions of times each day, we pattern a world collectively created by Twitter, Zynga, Facebook, Tencent, Foursquare, Google, Tumblr, Baidu, and thousands of other services. The Database of Intentions, first described in The Search, is far larger than even I imagined, and it is scaling to nearly incomprehensible size and power.

As we learn to leverage this ever-shifting platform called the Internet, we are at once renegotiating our social, economic, and cultural relationships – and we’re doing it in real time. How we interact with each other, how we engage with our government, how we conduct business, and even how we understand our place in the world – all has changed in the short fifteen years since the dawn of the commercial Internet. The pace only quickens. How might we understand where this is all headed?

Predictions of the future are tiresome – they lack detail, narrative, and staying power. But what if we could report the future? That sounds like a pretty good story. What We Hath Wrought will tell the story of the Web one generation from now.

To tell that story, I’m going to have to do a lot of reporting. I’ll need to talk to technologists, leaders of major corporations, marketers, politicians, academics, authors, artists, and yes, futurists as well. My goal is to steep myself in what’s happening now, and play the trends out one generation. I know, it’s an ambitious and even presumptuous goal. But it’s what keeps me up at night. And it’s also what we did at Wired for the five wonderful years while I was there – our goal was the report the future by playing out trends we could see right now.

One generation ago, I started as a cub reporter covering this industry. In the mid 1980s, personal computers were a novelty, the Internet was a research project, and phones sat on desks and tables, many with rotary dials. Who then could have predicted Google, or the iPhone, or Facebook?

Well, turns out a lot of folks wrote about the future back then, and many of them got a lot of things right (more got stuff wrong, of course). I’ve got a reading list of books that numbers in the hundreds, just for starters, and a source list that’s even longer. And I’m just getting started. Over the course of the next year I’ll be attacking the reporting of this book, and sketching up what I learn right here on this site, just as I did for The Search. And if I get half the feedback for this book that I got for the last one, I’ll consider myself a lucky man.

In a future post, I’ll outline how I plan to approach the reporting and writing of the book, in terms of structure. In short, I see four major narrative storylines. First is how the individual interacts with others – the social and cultural self. Second is how the individual interacts as a citizen – self to government – and how governments interact with each other. That’s the political and geopolitical narrative. Third is how the individual interacts with the economy – that’s the commercial narrative (and the one in which I’m the most versed as a journalist, certainly). Lastly, there’s the technological narrative – a description of the extraordinary tapestry of processors, bandwidth, and data we’ve built, and how it might evolve.

It’s my hope What We Hath Wrought will read like narrative journalism, playing 15 years of Internet history out into the future, describing that future as it came to exist, based on a number of clear storylines already in progress.

One last thing I’d like to say. Any narrative needs tension, and key actors. I can’t disclose who the actors might be, because honestly I have not decided. But I can frame the tension driving the story, and in short, it’s this: I believe we are in a critical moment in our civilization’s development, one where we will face a number of fateful decisions about how we interact with each other, with business, and with government. The decisions we make during this period will frame the kind of world we’ll leave to future generations. Who will control the data we create? What access will we allow citizens to the machinations of government? What kind of people will we become when every single one of us is deeply connected to a socially aware platform like Facebook? Are we building systems – in healthcare, energy, finance – that are too complicated for any of us to understand, much less control?

In short, can we handle what we are creating? Thirty or so years from now, will we be questioning ourselves – “Lord, what hath we wrought?” Or will we look upon what we hath wrought, and be pleased? I think the answer lies in exploring where we are, right now, and laying out the implications of our actions today. (And yes, I’m an optimist, which is why I moved the “hath” over one position in the title…)

To say I approach this book with trepidation is to understate my case. But I’ve never really done anything knowing with certainty where it’s going to end up. I hope you’ll join me on this journey. I’ll need the company!

PS – I’ve been tweeting stories that fit the book’s theme on the #wwhw hashtag. At some point, it might make more sense to just do a roundup of those stories here on Searchblog, instead, we’ll see. I’ll be easing into the work on this book this summer, and really be at it by the time Web 2 is over in the mid Fall. Meanwhile, the theme of Web 2 is directly related to the book, of course….

When Facebook announced it had convinced Carolyn Everson to leave Microsoft to head sales at the pre-IPO social networking giant, a few eyebrows lifted: Everson had only been at Microsoft for nine months, and was recruited there by CEO Steve Ballmer after he watched her work to integrate an important deal between Microsoft and MTV, where she previously worked.

While Microsoft could not have been pleased it lost a key sales executive, at least Everson was going to a friend of sorts: Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook stock, and has been busy leveraging Facebook data into its upstart search engine Bing.

Everson and I spoke last month as a prelude to our onstage conversation next week at the CM Summit. She repeated one of her early statements about Facebook’s advertising potential – “We’re one percent done” – and we spoke abut Facebook’s “branded stories” product, which lets companies put social activity related to the brand directly into Facebook advertisements (I ribbed her about how FM has been doing something similar for years, but of course, FM has about 10% of Facebook’s scale).

There are no shortage of questions to get into with Everson, including Facebook’s rumored push into content – something CEO Mark Zuckerberg implied was inevitable in recent public speeches. And then there’s the always rumored “Facesense” – a Facebook-data driven ad network for third party publishers that would take on Google’s display business. And of course, the recent launch of Facebook Deals, a Groupon competitor that is super focused on the local advertising marketplace.

And then there’s the question of privacy. While Zuckerberg has a clear philosophy on the question, and most likely it’s shared by a large percentage of his customers, advertisers are usually far more sensitive to how they use data, and, oddly enough, at far larger risk of regulatory backlash. And of course privacy laws are not only in flux (there are half a dozen or so proposed pieces of legislation in the US alone), but they vary greatly from country to country.

Lastly, there’s the rumored 2012 IPO, and with it the pressures of making quarterly numbers. As global sales chief, that responsibility falls to Everson.

In short, there are plenty of things to discuss, and that’s why I’ve asked Everson to be our last speaker at CM Summit, so if we go a bit long, we’re not bumping anyone else off the stage. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to ask her.

As a reminder, we’ll hear from more than 30 presenters at CM Summit, 11 of which will be one-one interviews. Those include:

The headline isn’t really reflective of Lucio’s views on Google, but there you have it. For most casual observers, Lucio is a firebrand calling out the largest force in digital marketing today.

I think what instead we’ll find on stage is a thoughtful marketer who has a clear agenda for making the transition to digital. And unlike many of his counterparts in consumer packed goods or auto, for example, he’s also at a firm whose very existence is challenged by the Internet. Visa, after all, is a payment processing business, a middleman, as it were, and if other middlemen find a more efficient way to execute what Visa does, well, Visa is threatened.

Lately those threats have gotten very real. Facebook, Google, Paypal, Amex, along with startups like Square and TrialPay are all looking to take Visa’s business, not to mention the threat of commercial banks like Chase and Citi, long Visa’s partners.

In short, the market is up for grabs, and product differentiation will be key. Lucio knows this, and we’ll be talking about it front and center next week. Sure, Visa will have to partner (it’s invested in Square, which some say wants to disrupt Visa’s business, for example) and build out new and innovative product offerings as plastic goes the way of the compact disc (Visa recently announced an NFC-based Digital Wallet initiative).

But where the brand will really have to pivot is in meaning more than “an easy way to pay.”

Key to that is social, Lucio told me. He recently delivered a message to all the marketers in his organization titled “The Three Principles of Social Media.” They are: “1) Sharing is the new giving; 2) Participation is the new engagement; and 3) Recommendations are the new advertising.” Expect Lucio to unpack each in our conversation.

Lucio certainly walks the walk when it comes to digital spending: nearly 40% of Visa’s annual marketing spend is in digital. Two years ago, that figure was 12%. He also wants to shake up how he works with his agencies – he directs his team to work directly with media and audiences first, then agencies. Them’s fighting words to many in the agency world.

Tell me in comments what you might want to hear from Lucio as I interview him next week.

As a reminder, we’ll hear from more than 30 presenters at CM Summit, 11 of which will be one-one interviews. Those include: